COURSE GUIDE - University of Edinburghhub.digital.education.ed.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/idel-2017-18-s1... · COURSE GUIDE: An Introduction to Digital Environments for Learning Session

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COURSE GUIDE: An Introduction to Digital Environments for Learning

Session 2017-18: Semester 1

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Contents

Welcome 3

Course team 4

Course learning outcomes 6

Delivery and workload 6

Holyrood Park Hub 6

Accessing Moodle 7

Computer skills and equipment you need 7

Course timings 8

Course structure 8 Community and criticality (weeks 1-4) 8 Sanctuary (week 5) 8 Spaces, openness and analytics (weeks 6-11) 8 Sanctuary revisited (week 12) 8

Course blog 9 Blog requirements 9 Very important: setting up the blog 10 Additional blog requirements for HEA Fellowship route 11

Minecraft activity 11

Participation etiquette 12

Assessment 13 1. The blog 13 2. The assignment 15 Submission dates 16 The postgraduate common marking scheme 16

Credit and continuation of study 17

Readings 17

Good academic practice on this course 17

Student-Staff Liaison Committee (SSLC) 18

Course tutor contact information 18

An introduction to digital environments for learning

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Welcome Welcome to An introduction to digital environments for learning (or ‘IDEL’), the core course for the MSc in Digital Education and the starting point for your studies with us. This course is noteworthy for its diversity of learning environments and the collaborative and individual learning tasks we ask you to engage in. Our aims are to provide a snapshot of some of the current technological possibilities in digital education, and to use these to cover some of the key practical and theoretical issues in the field. During the course you will experiment with a range of media for communication and for learning – from discussion boards to Twitter, Minecraft, Wordpress and videoconferencing – and you will engage with a range of conceptual areas important to research and practice in online education. In terms of assessment, you will use a blog to record and reflect on your studies, and you will be able to craft your own final assignment topic on an issue of direct relevance to you. While it is by no means compulsory, we do encourage you to present your final assignment in a medium other than print – a web essay, video or some other mode which reflects the need for us to engage, as teachers, with the new ways in which academic knowledge and discourse is now constructed. The course is taught by several different members of the programme team so that you get a chance to get to know us all at this early stage of your studies. There is continuity, too, in that you will have a dedicated tutor during your time on the course, who will be reading and commenting on your weblog and acting as your first point of contact for any academic concerns or questions. In many cases this person will remain your personal tutor throughout later courses on the MSc programme, but in some cases you will have a different tutor in that role. The course co-ordinator this semester is Rory Ewins, so please contact him with any bigger course-related issues you might have. All your course tutors are committed to working with you in online discussion, and in providing one-to-one support in your weblog. In return, we ask that you demonstrate a commitment to the collaborative activities and that you engage fully with the learning opportunities offered. We look forward to the coming weeks, and anticipate many interesting debates and discussions!


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Course team

Sian Bayne Sian is Professor of Digital Education in the School of Education, and Assistant Principal for Digital Education in the University. [email protected] +44 (0)131 651 6337 Skype: sianbayne1 Twitter: @sbayne

Noreen Dunnett Noreen is a PhD student in the Centre for Research in Digital Education and a former student of this course. She is also tutoring next semester on ‘Introduction to digital game-based learning’. Email: [email protected] Skype: noreen.dunnett1 Twitter: @comcultgirl

Peter Evans Peter is a Senior Teaching Fellow in the Institute for Education, Community and Society and leads on the course ‘Digital education strategy and policy’. [email protected] +44 (0)131 651 6345 Skype: peter.evans961 Twitter: @eksploratore

Rory Ewins Rory is a Lecturer in the Institute for Education, Community and Society and leads on the course ‘Digital education in global context’. He is course coordinator for IDEL this semester. [email protected] +44 (0)131 651 4789 Skype: roryewins Twitter: @speedysnail

Jeremy Knox Jeremy is a Lecturer in the Institute for Education, Community and Society and tutors on ‘Education and digital culture’. His background is in teaching, Special Educational Needs and software design. He is researching critical posthumanism and the implications of such thinking for open education. [email protected] +44 (0)131 651 6112 Twitter: @j_k_knox


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Stuart Nicol Stuart is a Learning Technology Team Manager in the Educational Design and Engagement Section. He is currently supporting the programme’s use of Minecraft. [email protected]

Clara O’Shea Clara is an Associate Lecturer in the School of Education. She is course leader for ‘Assessment, learning and digital education’ and co-tutors ‘Understanding learning in online environments’. [email protected] +44(0)131 651 6116 Skype: clara_oshea Twitter: @claraoshea

Jen Ross Jen is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education, and course leader for ‘Digital futures for learning’ and co-tutors on ‘Education and digital culture’. [email protected] +44 (0)131 651 6133 Twitter: @jar

Phil Sheail Phil is a Lecturer in the School of Education, researching temporality and institutional change in online distance education. Phil also has an interest in digital library resources for higher education, having previously worked for the Scottish Digital Library Consortium. She also teaches on ‘Course design for digital environments’. She is Programme Co-Director of the MSc in Digital Education. [email protected] +44 (0)131 651 6120

Christine Sinclair Christine is a Lecturer in the Institute for Education, Community and Society, course leader on ‘Course design for digital environments’, and Programme Co-Director of the MSc in Digital Education. [email protected] +44 (0)131 651 4192 Twitter: @CMSinclair


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Course learning outcomes The formal learning outcomes for the course are as follows. On completion of the course you will be able to: − critically evaluate a range of technologies in terms of their impact on teaching

and learning − begin to design your own online learning resources − contextualise your own practice in terms of the key issues emerging from

current research in digital education.

Delivery and workload IDEL is delivered entirely online using multiple technologies but with the virtual learning environment Moodle as its starting point. As with all the MSc courses, there is no requirement to attend on-campus. The choice of this mode of delivery not only enables you to shape your study pattern around your working day and other commitments, it also lets you experience first-hand the dynamics which result from working in a class which never physically meets. This is a double-credit course, successful completion of which will gain you 40 credits toward your MSc. This means that the workload is heavier than in the other, 20-credit, courses. Successful participation will require about 10-15 hours a week in discussion, reading, exploration and writing, with more than this likely around the time of assignment completion. As suggested in the introduction to this Course Guide, you will need to make a significant commitment to the course in order to contribute to class discussions and fully take part in the course activities. We would recommend logging in every day to keep track of class discussions, in addition to setting aside good chunks of time 3 or 4 times a week for undertaking course activities, doing the readings and making weblog entries. Although the course is designed to be as flexible as possible in terms of when you engage with it, you will need to keep up with the week-by-week structure in order to take part in the group activities.

Holyrood Park Hub The Hub is your entry-point to the programme, and provides a space for informal social networking with fellow students from across all courses, as well as your tutors. It is located at http://hub.digital.education.ed.ac.uk/ In our induction week we will encourage you to set up a Hub profile to help you get to know your fellow students. You will already have access to the Hub – the MSc Technologies Handbook takes you through how to use it.


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Accessing Moodle You will have access to the course Moodle space from Monday 11 September 2017. You can access it via the Holyrood Park Hub or directly from: https://www.moodle.is.ed.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=1065 Note that this link will not work before 11 September. You will need your student login (EASE).

Computer skills and equipment you need Your Technologies Handbook gives a full rundown of what to do in terms of gaining access to University systems before beginning your studies. You do not need to be an advanced computer user to do any of the courses on the MSc, though you will need a basic level of competence in the use of your computer. You should know how to use a web browser, email, and a word-processor, and be reasonably confident in managing files on your computer, downloading documents from the internet and using the odd social media application (even if it’s just Facebook!). As with all MSc courses, to take part in IDEL you will need regular access to a computer with a broadband connection. You will need Acrobat Reader or a comparable PDF application (such as Preview on Mac OS X) to access the course readings. Some of the tools we use require access to a computer with a reasonably high specification, and for Minecraft PE a smartphone, tablet or similar mobile device. If this is a problem for you, discuss the situation with your blog tutor, who will talk through the options with you. The Technologies Handbook has more about what is required in terms of computer specifications for our tools and online environments. The voice and video sessions on certain weeks will require a microphone, headphones/headset, and a webcam. Again, if this is a problem for you, please contact the tutors for those weeks.


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Course timings IDEL runs over 12 weeks, or one semester, from Monday 18 September until Sunday 10 December 2017. The week prior to the start of teaching (11-17 September) is an orientation week to become familiar with the basic web environments we use. Reflecting the pattern of work of many of our students, a week of study on this course includes the weekend, i.e. each week of work runs from Monday to Sunday. Discussion boards remain busy on weekends, and many students also post to their blogs at this time. Tutors and topic leaders are active during the working week, from Monday to Friday; blog tutors will discuss with you at the outset their planned schedule for commenting on your blog posts.

Course structure The course is divided into two sections, with a reading week in the middle and a blogging-only week at the end. An outline is given here, and you’ll find more detail in the course Moodle site itself.

Community and criticality (weeks 1-4) We begin with the theme of ‘Constructing community’ in order to start to establish ourselves as such and to explore what might be an emergent netiquette for our engagement with each other, using the discussion board – a relatively slow, structured mode of communication. In week 2 we consider what it means to teach, using Twitter and the discussion board to discuss how the role of the teacher might be changing in response to digital culture. Finally, weeks 3 and 4 look at ‘Critical perspectives’, using Skype text and voice chat to discuss a range of general issues around digital education and how to approach them in a critical way. During week 3 you will be asked to complete the first of two structured tasks for your weblog – a critical analysis of one of the core readings – in order to receive feedback on your academic writing skills at an early stage.

Sanctuary (week 5) This week we take a break from activities and discussion to give time to read, reflect, build and blog, and for tutors to provide some half-way feedback on your critical analysis and on how your blog is going so far.

Spaces, openness and analytics (weeks 6-11) In this second main section we will consider three broad themes in two-week blocks. First we explore issues of spaces, looking at digital representations of spatial metaphors, using Minecraft as a focus for our activities. Week 7 includes our second structured weblog task, in which you will be asked to use images to support an argument in relation to a key reading, rather than simply as illustration. In weeks 8-9 we engage with the notion of ‘openness’, exploring such areas as MOOCs and credentialing. We then switch focus for weeks 10-11 to look at issues around data and analytics, including issues of profiling and personalisation, privacy and surveillance, and the ‘tracks and traces’ we leave as we conduct educational work within digital spaces.

Sanctuary revisited (week 12) Week 12 is devoted to wrapping up your weblog and thinking about the assignment.


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Course blog As a participant in the course you will have your own blog. Blogs (or ‘weblogs’) are a popular form of web publishing, perhaps best described as web-based diaries – personally published web documents updated regularly and frequently, which usually have a subjective and informal tone. Blog entries tend to consist of commentaries or musings on a particular theme, often include hyperlinks, and are almost always time- or date-stamped. Blogs are not always individual and private – they can be collective and public and are used as such in other MSc courses – but on this course we are using blogs that participants build on their own. Your blog on this course will in general not be open or public like others you may have seen, but instead will be read only by you and your tutor. More on this below, in the section on setting up your blog. The idea is to use the blog as an online reflective diary – a place where you bring together your various threads of investigation and thought. It is intended to be a record of your thinking and development, not a neatly finished ‘place of arrival’ – the main requirement is that you use it in an open and reflective way. There is more below on the criteria we use to assess blogs. You may also find useful a short article with some theoretical background on the nature of reflection in education at http://infed.org/mobi/reflection-learning-and-education/ Your blog is intended to function as an ongoing, preservable dialogue between you and your blog tutor, growing around your developing ideas and insights. Using this specifically online format gives you the opportunity to think about how alternative – digital – literacies might be used within teaching contexts. See the Technologies Handbook for how to use the main features of the blog, and below for vital information about how to set it up for this course specifically.

Blog requirements You should begin using your blog as soon as the course starts. Please note that if you do not have any substantive blog entries by the beginning of week 3 we will assume you are not on-course and you will be withdrawn – please speak to your blog tutor in good time (or, if you prefer, the course organiser) if you are having problems with the blog. Your entries should be regular and frequent. This does not mean that you have to make an entry every day, but you should be adding some form of reflective commentary at each point of your engagement with the course material. We recommend you aim for two or three times a week, depending on the length of your entries; however we also recognise that some students focus their work at the weekends so may wish to write longer postings less often. How your blog develops will be very much up to you and your emerging blogging ‘voice’. You may, for example, decide to use it in a very structured way by entering relatively formal comments and reflections specific to each week’s activities. Alternatively, you might decide that a less formal, more open-ended, ‘stream-of-consciousness’ mode suits you better. You will also need to find some balance between your blog entries and your contributions to the group discussions elsewhere in IDEL. It is up to you how you negotiate this. You may wish to use the blog for more reflective or tentative commentary than you would wish to post to discussion, or you may find it works well as a space where you can expand on the points you make to the group as a


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whole. If you wish to re-use blog entries in the discussion board or vice versa this is acceptable, as long as you bear in mind that the audience for each is rather different (and always remembering that discussion board postings should be kept reasonably short!). As well as these more general entries, the blog will also involve two more structured and formal tasks, one in week 3 and another in week 7. More information about these tasks will be provided in the appropriate areas of the course site. These tasks will provide an opportunity for ‘feed-forward’ comments from your tutor: that is, feedback which in turn provides helpful guidance for your final assignment.

Very important: setting up the blog The blogging environment for the MSc programme (the multisite version of WordPress) has been selected for the control it gives over the permissions and privacies associated with individual posts. Posts can be kept entirely private (in draft mode), shared with all other users of our WordPress site, or restricted to any one of a series of pre-defined groups, and this is entirely under your control as the blog author. This lets you post blog entries relevant to any of your courses (or indeed none), and to address each entry to any desired audience. For this course, however, you are expected to post entries which can only be read by tutors on the programme. We strongly encourage you to keep course posts private between you and your tutor, at least at first. Every blog is crafted according to its expected readership – for the purposes of this course, we would like you to be writing in a personal, informal style, and for the blog to be a place where you gain one-to-one support from your tutor. The blog is high stakes in this course, contributing 60% to your final mark, so please do take some time to set it up properly at the beginning of the semester. To do this you have to set your ‘tutor group’ as described in the Technologies Handbook, and then remember to restrict access to each post to that group. For the purposes of this course, the ‘group’ will consist of your IDEL blog tutor and the course coordinator (to help with tutor support and with marking arrangements at the end of the course). At the end of the semester, you can choose which posts you want to have included for assessment, and which (if any) you want to revert to ‘draft’ so that they are not assessed (see below for more information about this). If a post is intended to be part of the assessed work it must be posted so that it can be read by your blog tutor and the course coordinator. Please note that only your blog tutor will be regularly reading and commenting on your blog. The course coordinator will have access for tutor support purposes, and other tutors, and our External Examiner, will have access to a PDF of your blog for assessment purposes at the end of semester. A small note on tags: Tags are a useful way of categorising the content of your posts, so that you can start to identify themes and issues of interest in your writing. For those students taking more than one course that uses the blog, keywords for the courses can also help you (and your tutor!) keep track of your work across courses. We suggest ‘idelsep17’ as the keyword for this course. To help us manage our commenting on your blogs, could you please tag any posts you would particularly like feedback on (one per week) with ‘forcomment’, so that your tutor will know where best to focus.


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Additional blog requirements for HEA Fellowship route For those working in higher education there is an optional route through the programme which meets the requirements of the UK Professional Standards Framework and results in accreditation as a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA). See the programme handbook for more information about the HEA, eligibility, and accreditation. Those following the HEA route will need to meet some additional requirements in this course. In IDEL, at least three of your blog posts during the semester need to include discussion of how the following topics are relevant to your own professional Higher Education role and context:

1. assessment and feedback 2. student diversity 3. effective learning environments 4. participatory learning environments

You should refer to course readings and topics in these posts wherever possible. In short, we are looking to see you connect your own practice in these areas with what you have learned on this course. At the end of semester, you will need to submit, along with your blog, the information highlighted in the HEA Fellowship Route form, which you can find in the assessment area of the IDEL Moodle space. Your blog tutor will then fill in the rest of the form, confirming that you have satisfactorily addressed each of these four topics in your blog. This will be returned to you along with your marks and feedback. If you have any questions about this, please contact the programme director, Christine Sinclair: [email protected]

Minecraft activity We use Minecraft as an environment for building and experimenting over the length of the course. Minecraft is what is described as a ‘sandbox’ game, where you can create your own world by building and crafting with blocks. There are no extrinsic goals or rules – players are free to explore the world and build things as they wish. It is particularly popular with children, and is being used increasingly for education and learning at all levels. The element of hands-on crafting of space connects with many of the areas of research and practice we study on this course. It is also great fun, and we hope it will help students come together to co-create some exciting spaces and to discuss the ways in which virtual spaces, maker cultures and the joy of building can support educational innovation. Your work in Minecraft will take the following form:

• In week 1 of the course, please attend one of our 1-hour tutorials on Minecraft to get you started.

• Once you are comfortable with Minecraft, we would like you to work individually or with other students to build a learning environment of your own within the shared space we will provide. This can take the form of:

o a classroom build o an educational activity of some kind


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o a story path o a challenge o anything that you devise for yourself.

• We would like to you to blog about your Minecraft work throughout the

course, but particularly in weeks 6 and 7, when ‘Space’ is a core theme. During these weeks there will be organised Minecraft tutorials in which we will walk around all the learning spaces to discuss and share them.

In Minecraft there are two modes of play – survival and creative. If you choose to play in ‘survival’ mode you have to gather natural resources (such as wood and stone) found in the environment in order to craft certain blocks and items. Depending on the difficulty, monsters spawn in darker areas outside a certain radius of the character, requiring the player to build a shelter at night. The mode also features a health bar which is depleted by attacks from monsters, falls, drowning, falling into lava, suffocation, starvation, and other events. However, we will be setting our game in ‘creative’ mode which means you will have access to all of the resources and items in the game through the inventory menu, and can place or remove them instantly. You will be able to fly freely around the game world, will not take environmental or mob damage, and will not be affected by hunger. This will enable you to focus on building and creating larger projects. Please be aware that we will be using the PE (Pocket Edition) version of Minecraft. There will be further details and technical support in the Technical Handbook to get you up and running, in addition to the planned tutorials. The important thing to remember about Minecraft is the learning comes through doing. When constructing a learning space remember that it is about constructing scaffolding for learning – opening up possibilities for people to explore and learn in their own way rather than providing directed learning. For some examples of the kind of things you can build and ways people have set up learning in Minecraft, see the curated set of resources in the Minecraft area of the Moodle course.

Participation etiquette Much of the course group discussion during the coming weeks will take place using discussion boards and other synchronous and asynchronous environments. As a participant in this course, you are expected to make regular contributions to these discussions. For the synchronous ‘real time’ sessions, details of class times will be posted in Moodle – please book these into your schedule as soon as they become available. When taking part in online discussion, some basic rules of netiquette apply. Please keep contestation polite and try to respond to others’ contributions if no-one else has. Contributions to the discussion don’t have to be beautifully structured, referenced and written in formal, typo-free academic prose. As long as they are clear, friendly and help move the discussion along in a positive way, all will be well! Try also to keep your discussion board postings reasonably short – long, intricate contributions tend not to be read, and can put others off contributing themselves.


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Assessment The course will be assessed in two ways:

1. by your personal blog (60% of your final mark) 2. by an assignment (40% of your final mark)

1. The blog

Blog assessment criteria In assessing the blog, the following criteria will apply. The criteria are based on the university’s Postgraduate Common Marking Scheme, which is more fully described in your Programme Handbook. − Reflection

Does the weblog demonstrate sustained reflection on the course content and its application for the participant’s professional practice?

− Regularity Are entries into the weblog frequent and substantial enough to demonstrate such sustained reflection? Are they spread throughout the duration of the course? Have both of the structured tasks been properly attempted?

− Knowledge and understanding Does the weblog demonstrate a good critical understanding of the technologies and ideas introduced? Does it show a critical awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of a range of technologies and pedagogical approaches?

− Communication style and multimodality Is the style of the weblog vivid and personal? Are the ideas discussed well-structured and well-argued? Are sources cited – either conventionally or via links? Does it make creative use of the weblog form via inclusion of image, media and linkage?

For example, a weblog graded at 70% or above (an A) would meet the criteria in the following way: 70% - 100% Reflection Writing is consistently and deeply reflective, with many insightful connections made between the participant’s professional practice and course content. Regularity Entries are made more than once a week, and are evenly spread throughout the duration of the course. Knowledge and understanding Writing critically engages in a consistent way with the content of the course and the course readings. Evidence is shown of reading and thought which goes beyond the immediate course content. The process of developing understanding is coherently described and reflected upon. Communication style and multimodality Writing is grammatical and flows well (though this need not be in conventional academic style). Original ideas are well and creatively expressed, and argumentation is coherent and clear. A sense of creative and personal ownership


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of the weblog is conveyed and imaginative use of multiple media and modes is made. By contrast, a failing blog (0-39%) would demonstrate the following in relation to the criteria: 0% - 39% Reflection Writing shows no reflection, and no connections are made between the participant’s professional practice and course content. Regularity Entries are made very infrequently, or are very unevenly spread throughout the duration of the course. Knowledge and understanding Writing does not engage with the content of the course, and no evidence is shown of sustained reading within course content. There is no evidence of the process of developing understanding. Writing style Writing is consistently ungrammatical and difficult to read. There is no evidence of original thinking in terms of ideas or creative usage of the weblog form.

Submitting your blog for assessment At the end of semester, you can choose to include all or some of your blog posts for assessment purposes. To remove a post so that it is not assessed, click the ‘edit’ button on the post in question, edit the status of the post in the Publish panel to ‘Draft’, click ‘OK’ to save this status change, and then click the ‘Update’ button to apply the change to your blog.

This will ensure that no one except you can read this blog post. Use this with care – don’t leave a blog post out of your assessed blog just because you no longer agree with it, for example! Each substantive post that you include will show something of your reflections on the course and will help demonstrate the regularity of your contributions. Do not hesitate to ask your tutor if you have any questions or anxieties about the blog assessment.


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2. The assignment

Rationale and requirements In addition to the blog, you will also be required to produce a written assignment on one of the questions in the Assessment area of the course Moodle site. The form of the written assignment may be experimental or conventional, as you choose. For example, you might choose to present it as a wiki, or a hypertext or illustrated web essay. You are encouraged to use writing forms that are specific to the internet, with the proviso that they can be preserved and submitted in a reasonably stable form for assessment. The aim is to give you space to experiment with alternative ways of presenting scholarly discourse in a digital environment, if you wish to do so. If you prefer simply to write a conventional essay, however, this too is perfectly acceptable. You may also produce the assignment collaboratively with a partner. Should you choose this option, there are additional possibilities for your assignment format – a series of email exchanges with reflective commentary, for example, or an annotated chat session. If you decide to collaborate, you and your partner will each be given the same mark and feedback for the piece of work you submit. The assignment should be 2,500 words in length +/-10%, not including the reference list but including footnotes and tables where present. For some formats, such as hypertext or video, this can only be a loose guide to the amount of work you should be putting into the piece, and it will be up to you to consider how this length guide translates.

Assessment criteria for the assignment This assignment will be assessed according to three core criteria: − Knowledge and understanding of concepts

Does the assignment show a critical engagement with the concepts and theories introduced? (Descriptive accounts lacking in analysis will be marked down.)

− Knowledge and use of the literature Have the relevant key references been used? Have other relevant sources been drawn on and coherently integrated into the analysis?

− Constructing academic discourse Is the assignment produced with careful attention to the quality of the writing and the skilful expression of ideas? Is it within word count?

The Postgraduate Common Marking Scheme described in the Programme Handbook gives more detail on how the core assessment criteria are graded. Since the assignment offers such broad scope in terms of topic and form, you are also encouraged to suggest up to three additional criteria defined by yourself. This can seem like more work at the time, but offers a valuable way to think through some of the crucial issues around how we should go about assessing learning in such digital environments – particularly if you are experimenting with media forms. For example, if you were working with the web and hypertext, you might wish to include visual impact and effective linking as additional criteria or, if you choose


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to submit with a partner, you may wish to include effective collaboration as a criterion. You would need to propose your additional criteria at the same time that you gain your tutor’s approval for the final assignment topic, by the end of week 12.

Submission dates Your weblog should be finalised by the end of week 12 of the course, Sunday 10 December 2017. Posts made after this date will not be assessed. Your assignment should be submitted by Sunday 7 January 2018. You will submit it using Moodle – instructions for this are in the Technologies Handbook.

The postgraduate common marking scheme Grades will be awarded in line with the University’s postgraduate common marking scheme: Mark (%) Grade Description

90-100 A1 An excellent performance, satisfactory for a distinction



60-69 B A very good performance

50-59 C A good performance, satisfactory for a masters degree

40-49 D A satisfactory performance for the diploma, but inadequate for a masters degree

30-39 E Marginal fail

20-29 F Clear fail

10-19 G Bad fail

0-9 H Bad fail The pass mark is grade D (40%). For more detail on the regulations governing the course and the programme you should consult your Programme Handbook and the University’s Degree Regulations and Programmes of Study (DRPS), which can be found at: http://www.drps.ed.ac.uk/ In particular, the regulations governing taught postgraduate programmes are at: http://www.drps.ed.ac.uk/16-17/regulations/PGDRPS2016-17.pdf


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Credit and continuation of study Successful completion of this course will give you 40 credits at postgraduate level 11 within the Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework (SCQF). More details of the SCQF can be found at: http://www.scqf.org.uk/ The full MSc in Digital Education will comprise one foundation course (this one) and four additional 20-credit courses, one of which should be ‘Research methods’, plus a dissertation worth 60 credits. The list of available options can be found at: http://digital.education.ed.ac.uk/ The regulations governing satisfactory progress for continuation to Masters level (that is, the dissertation stage) are given in your Programme Handbook.

Readings You are not required to purchase any books for this course, although we do suggest the following as optional additional reading:

Selwyn, N. (2014), Distrusting Educational Technology: Critical Questions for Changing Times (London: Routledge)

We also suggest some videos to watch before week 1; there will be links to these in Moodle. All core readings are provided in the course Moodle space. Some are provided through e-reserve, which means they have been copyright-cleared specifically for this course, and are available to download in PDF format from the course site. Others are journal articles made available via the University of Edinburgh e-journal collections, or are openly available on the web. Beyond the core readings, most topics of study will guide you toward useful secondary and additional readings. Some of these may require you to track down journal articles or book chapters yourself, using the University Library’s search tools. References to secondary and additional readings are collected together in the relevant areas of course content. The Holyrood Park Hub also contains a list of relevant journals, all of which are either open-access or available via the University of Edinburgh library online. The collection of resources and readings referred to is quite large. Please don’t be put off by this, or feel you have to read everything! The core readings for each block of study will always be made clear. Any readings recommended beyond this are simply to follow up on if you wish to, particularly for your final assignment. You are not expected to do all the secondary or additional readings for each area of study, though you should aim to do some of them.

Good academic practice on this course During this course you will be doing quite a bit of reading, alongside the activities and course discussions. It will be particularly helpful at this early stage to get into the good note-taking habit of always including the sources of quotes or summaries you are jotting down. This will prevent having to retrace your


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steps to find sources later on, and the danger of accidentally using words or ideas you’ve read, without attribution, in assessed work. Copying and pasting key passages from online sources and PDFs is convenient, but you have to remember to reference them; accidental lack of attribution in assessed work is still considered academic misconduct, so you should always be attentive to this. It’s also important to keep track of the sources of images and videos, and to credit these if you use them in your own work. The programme handbook provides more guidance on referencing, and your blog tutor will be happy to discuss any questions you have. Academics and researchers tend to each have their own (sometimes arcane) systems for collecting references. If you can get into the habit now of saving all the references you are reading and using in one place, this will help you a lot in your assignments on this and future courses. There are a number of really good online and hybrid systems that can help you, such as EndNote, Zotero and Mendeley, some of which are free to use.

Some helpful online courses provided by the university’s Institute for Academic Development can be found here: http://www.ed.ac.uk/institute-academic-development/postgraduate/taught/courses-events/online

Student-Staff Liaison Committee (SSLC) The SSLC was formed in the spring of 2015 to provide a forum for discussing issues arising on the programme and potential changes to it. The committee is chaired by a student and there is representation of students from across the programme and a smaller number of staff. The committee meets at least once a semester. Meetings are held online at a time that fits in with varying timezones. Opportunities to join this committee will arise from time to time; think about whether you would like to be considered for membership. However, your voice can be heard anyway. There is a discussion forum where all students are welcome to contribute views and suggestions. You’ll find this, minutes of meetings, reports and other documentation in the SSLC section of our MSc in Digital Education Moodle site: https://www.moodle.is.ed.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=131 This is only available when you are logged into Moodle, so new students will not be able to access it until they have been given access to the Moodle platform.

Course tutor contact information For help and advice, contact your blog tutor – whose details you will find in the Moodle space – or the course coordinator, who this semester is: Rory Ewins [email protected] +44 (0)131 651 4789 Skype: roryewins Twitter: @speedysnail Good luck with your studies, and we look forward to seeing you online!

Documents

COURSE GUIDE - University of Edinburghhub.digital.education.ed.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/idel-2017-18-s1... · COURSE GUIDE: An Introduction to Digital Environments for Learning Session